


been on the road to glory, boy

by sharivan



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-21
Updated: 2015-11-21
Packaged: 2018-05-02 15:49:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5254055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharivan/pseuds/sharivan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her time as a warden is marked principally by blood. Flecks of it dry on her face until the skin pulls uncomfortably, on her armor until the leather is permanently mottled however carefully she cleans and oils it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	been on the road to glory, boy

Her time as a warden is marked principally by blood. Flecks of it dry on her face until the skin pulls uncomfortably, on her armor until the leather is permanently mottled however carefully she cleans and oils it. 

As soon as she joins the wardens are mostly dead, the survivors hunted. Alistair is grieving and apparently constitutionally unsuited for leadership. Which leaves everything up to Leta, newly a warden and newly separated from her clan.

It’s a mercy that Morrigan and Alistair can loathe each others as equals at least. Were Alistair in charge they would surely tear each other to pieces. Neither can muster quite the same vitriol for Leta, only criticize her every decision - why are we getting involved, why are we threatening a priest, why aren’t we always threatening priests?

***

Redcliffe is close and Alistair knows it, so they head there first. For all her talk of blood magic Morrigan can’t actually use any and the Circle is too far away - by the time they could return with mages there might be no one left alive in Redcliffe.

For a sick, terrible moment she thinks the demon will return just in time for Caleb to kill his mother. But the boy holds on long enough for Isolde to kill him and the demon both.

They have hardly left the town behind when Alistair asks venomously how Lyna could kill a child.

“Why, Alistair,” Morrigan says, “Surely you remember it was Arless Isolde who killed Caleb. We were there, after all.”

He says, “There must have been another way!” and Leta finds herself suddenly unsure how old Alistair was. Too old, she would have thought, for this outright denial of reality. Unless humans liked their templars this way, all passion and justice and no sense.

This is a strange and horrifying new world for Leta too. “We stood in that hall and you said killing the boy was the only option. And it was.” She doesn’t ask if he’s angry because he fears Caleb died because of what he said in the hall. She doesn’t need to.

“I…What will the Arl say?”

“Should he ever tell us anything, it had best be ‘thank you for not leaving all of Redcliffe to die,’” Morrigan says.

“Hey, hey.” Leta taps Alistair’s arm.

“It was my decision, and I would do I again. If…” she sighs. “If you want to travel separately we’ll figure it out.” The Qunari and the Chantry sister wait for them a day to the east; if Alistair travels with them to find whatever sacred relic the Arl needs then she can continue with Morrigan and Dog to find the closest Dalish clan. It would certainly be more efficient.

***

“Was it entirely wise to put Alistair in a position of authority?” Moroccan asked on the way to the Brecilian Forest. “He looks capable enough from a distance but as soon as he speaks, the illusion is broken.”

The potential drawbacks had hardly escaped Leta. On the other hand, “But now you’ll have a few weeks away from him. Surely that goes some way toward making up for it.” The mabari wandered ahead, not especially interested in their discussion.

“It does help,” Morrigan agreed.

***

Zathrian’s clan welcome Leta and her companions despite their grief. She becomes entangled in their problems almost immediately - sure, she can deal with the werewolves, find out what happened to your wife, look for ironbark. You’re in love with a woman who’s made it very clear she’s not interested? That Leta can’t help with.

The werewolves are not quite as described. They speak, they refer to a grievance with the Dalish but refuse to give specifics. The missing woman has indeed become a werewolf and finds it unbearable. Leta takes the scarf from her corpse and wonders if she had arrived sooner, or said something different, Danyla might have chosen differently. After all, Leta is not unfamiliar with finding herself forever changed by forces beyond her control, although she at least still looks much the same. She could have said yes, the blood in your veins is no longer our own and it hurts and it’s wrong but listen. I think I can stop it. Just wait, just hold on, you can always kill yourself later. 

But she didn’t say any of that, not when it might have made a difference. They return to the camp and Leta tells Danyla’s husband what befell her. Exactly what happened to her. She is not a diplomat or beholden to these people; if Zathrian is lying to them she has no obligation to back him up. So she tells herself as she turns over the scarf, as she asks Zathrian more pointed questions and finds herself less satisfied with the answers.

They limp back through the ruins, the mabari’s wounds scabbing over as they walked, Leta breathing carefully, unsure if her rib was just damaged or actually broken. She was willing to kill just about anyone to protect the Dalish, but these particular people didn’t seem to need killing.

Zathrian waits just inside the entrance. He asks what she would have done and of course, of course she would have done anything in her power to hurt those who hurt her children. Though perhaps not by turning them and all their children into ten foot tall monsters who could attack and infect others she cared about. When your vengeance hurt you and innocents it was time to reconsider.

Morrigan and Leta flank Zathrian on the way back down. The mabari stays at Leta’s side for once instead of wandering, both their teeth bared.

The talks fail in no time at all and Leta is full of rage. She fights Zathrian to a standstill and Morrigan is blessedly silent about who they’re defending. Not especially eager to fight a dozen werewolves and a spirit instead of one mage, maybe. Zathrian breaks the curse and the humans run off to join a world they’ve never known. When the new keeper has promised her support and Danyla is buried, the three of them head west once more to rejoin the others at Recliffe.

An hour or so after leaving the camp Morrigan says, “My mother, you know, created her own monsters. Or became them, maybe. She’s the one who taught me to shapeshift.”

This is not terribly surprising. Who else in the Korcari Wilds could’ve taught her?

“When she was young, she was betrayed…”

Halfway through the story Morrigan’s hand rests gingerly against Leta’s back for a moment. The sky is clear, the road blessedly free of sylvans and giant spiders. They travel on.

***

Leta is heading into Redclife from their camp for the sixth time in as many days when she’s told something’s happening at the keep. She finds the Arl recovered and appropriately grateful, Leliana and Alistair both overcome with religious fervor over the temple of Andraste. An errand she is glad to have been spared.

The Arl’s gratitude is accompanied by some very wild ideas about making Alistair king. He would be unlikely to allow darkspawn to take over the countryside, she supposes. For all the Arl’s talk of bloodlines and Ferelden sovereignty, Leta suspects it’s Alistair’s biddable nature and personal loyalty to Eamon that motivate him. She would not mind a king in her debt either.

Sten’s absence cannot fail to be conspicuous.

“He attacked me,” Alistair tells her. “I sent him back to the Qunari - he’s no good to us if we can’t trust him at our back.”

It’s true enough. Still, five cannot be split as easily as six. They travel together to Orzammer, Morrigan asking about Alistair’s secret birthright - how convenient, that one of the surviving wardens should also be heir to the throne. Leliana asks Morrigan intrusive questions about her mother in turn. Leta listens, and watches her companions, and occasionally draws them out. Morrigan is poisonous and uncomfortable in company; if she only chose her targets differently she might have been one of Leta’s sisters. Leliana’s piety remains unsettling. It’s a motive Leta can’t trust, however sincere it may be. The same traits that would make Alistair a disastrous king make him a trusted ally so long as older loyalties didn’t come into competition with current ones. They are too volatile, too at odds with one another, her current friends. But they fight well together. Bandits and assassins alike fall before them on the way to Orzammer.

***

Leta wakes in a panic from a dream about the archdemon. The sign of a true blight, Alistair tells her, that they both dream of it. Poison in their veins, fell dreams, solving everyone else’s problems so they will agree to do something about the darkspawn currently killing everyone in their path: the glamorous life of a Grey Warden.

The glamorous short life of a warden. It’s not that Leta thought she would live a long one, fighting darkspawn and blamed for killing a king. She was a practical woman. The certainty of death still came as a blow.

“Thirty years after the joining. The older wardens would say you knew when it was coming so you could go to the deep roads to fight until you die,” Alistair tells her.

She is lonely among all these humans away from everyone she knows. As Leta brews poisons that evening just far enough from the fire for safety, she flirts with Alistair until he stammers and walks away. The way he pretends to ignore Morrigan’s laughter is almost believable.

“Alistair? Truly?” she asks.

“You have seen him.”

“He can be endearingly naive,” Leliana agrees. “Like a wide-eyed ingenue, no? Not really my type but there’s a certain appeal.”

“Surely not once he opens his mouth!”

The three of them get drunk on a truly repulsive bottle of brandy taken from some dank cave, sprawled on the ground as they brag about heroic exploits and past lovers and the glorious futures that await them after the war.

In the morning Leta apologizes to Alistair and tries not to smile when he blushes and assures her she’s forgiven.

She gives him an unsettling statuette from the Brecilian forest and listens to his delighted theories about its possible eldritch qualities. He would be a terrible king. She’s glad to have him at her side.

***

There is no end to the favors Harrowmont asks. They need a paragon to break their deadlock? She will drag one back from the center of the horde if need be.

Branka’s husband is a disaster, reeking of drink and rude to everyone. He knows the Deep Roads so she brings him anyway. At least he doesn’t try to duel anyone or fret over their souls. They’ll take what they can get.

The deep roads are claustrophobic and stuffy and filled with darkspawn. This, if she’s lucky, is where she’ll end her life decades down the road. She might prefer another Ostagar.

They head further and further from the city in tunnels miles from any route to the surface. Oghren only gets drunker; Leta might not have minded so much if he’d shared. After he starts hitting on Morrigan, as horrified by the idea as she is by crowds and casual touching, Leta is less forgiving.

“We get out of these tunnels and I’ll cut him loose,” Lyna promises. Morrigan doesn’t thank her but she doesn’t ask what in Thedas she means either.

***  
Leta is limping and trying to determine if her eyes will focus when Leliana says, “You have a unique fighting style for a rogue.”

She’s never favored bows, but she fights as she was taught, quick and vicious.

“It gets the job done.”

Leliana doesn’t appear to believe her. She’s standing over the bodies of two cultist reavers and Leliana doesn’t think she can handle herself?

“It’s just, you attack a little more directly than most folks in your weight class. And - Morrigan, will you take a look at her?”

There is a hand grabbing her forehead more forcefully than really seems necessary - and, oh. Maybe seeing isn’t the way to go just now.

“You have a concussion. Because you fight like an idiot.”

They retreat to a relatively safe part of the cave - what she would give to spend her life anywhere but a cave - where Leliana delivers a lecture on playing to one’s strengths and not running ahead so enemies gang up on you before your friends can catch up. It’s more persuasive than Leta expects, particularly once she gets to the ‘and no one has to make sure you don’t have brain damage’ portion of the talk.

Morrigan and Alistair seem to agree with her. Perhaps she has gotten a little careless. Her vision clears and she braces the leg and agrees to try to act like a person who doesn’t want to draw every firebomb and melee blow available.

The next time they take a break she’s not the only one with multiple injuries. Progress.

***

They have been too long underground. Leta is sure they’ll have to travel by night when they return to the surface until their eyes can stand sunlight again. She gives up complaining about dwarves statesmen to lament the darkness and labyrinthine tunnels. Then she gives up even that and speaks mostly in battle, losing even the enthusiasm to properly appreciate Alistair’s new penchant for leaping upon their enemies.

“The Dead Trenches. How cheery,” Alistair says after they find Branka’s journal. It gets, unbelievably, worse after that. Not just more darkspawn but other horrors, flesh growing on the stones in the shape of no earthly creature, just meat. Further in the flesh is everywhere and a woman’s voice tells them horror stories from behind solid stone. 

She is on the ground, vomiting less from the blow than the sudden realization that this might be what awaits her in the deep roads. Not just a slow death in the dark but this unbecoming. Once she can get up Leta scales the broodmother, severs her spine with both blades. 

The Grey Wardens’ traditions are terrible. She will not return to the deep roads to seek her death.

Branka is mad or obsessed - she cares only for golems to move at her command, not at all for the people who would die to make them.

An army of golems would be a fine thing. Even ogres would fall before them. They have their weaknesses - that control rod, far too vulnerable to hijackers - but in the end Leta’s decision is not dispassionately strategic. She lacks the stomach to send unwilling dwarves to lose their lives and wills to the machines. When Morrigan suggests keeping the anvil, as she wants to keep everything powerful and dangerous, Leta coldly points out that her own life might fuel a wondrous golem indeed. It’s a weakness, the way she always sees herself in the person holding a weapon and not the one it’s used against. She’s reliable for all that. Even Oghren doesn’t switches sides to fight alongside his wife, which is an unexpected but welcome gift.

They return to Orzammer with a crown and a tracing and no Paragon, both Branka and Corian dead by the ruined Anvil of the Void. Nothing has been decided in their absence. They have given enough for the dwarves already. On the assembly floor Leta tells the truth. She announces that the Paragon gave her a crown for her choice of king and the members of the assembly…accept her choice.

She doesn’t scream that nothing has changed, that they have only her account of what happened in the Deep Roads, that everything could have been resolved weeks ago if the ancestors spoke through her. It is almost a relief when Bhaelen attacks - a traitor and a fratricide, a disgrace to his name - so she can snarl and stab without repercussions.

“So always to traitors?” Morrigan asks, sotto voce, as they leave the assembly hall for what Leta desperately hopes will be the last time.

“To our enemies,” she suggests, and Morrigan smiles.

***

Denerim is too big and too crowded but hardly anyone tries to kill them. They’ve been worse places.

They had wanted to stock up on supplies, to collect on the debt Genitivi owed Leliana and Alistair, to see if the scales they’d been carrying could be made into something useful. It was something of a shock when all those errands went smoothly. Oh, someone in plate armor had a grudge against wardens but a few well-timed threats sent him on his way. They ran off a few mercenaries who’d made themselves unwelcome for a pittance. It was positively restful.

Alistair’s sister, though, was not pleased to have this stranger - well-fed, well-armed, well-educated - in her home claiming kinship and Leta can hardly blame her. She tries to be poised and diplomatic since no one else in the room can manage it and then Goldana refers to her as Alistair’s servant and poise is no longer an option. 

Doesn’t she notice Leta’s beautiful armor, the gleaming blades on her back? Equipment at least as good as what Alistair wears for all that it’s lighter. Did she think Leta was smoothing things over to what, get in the good graces of some human she served? She doubts Goldana interferes in the arguments of those who think themselves her betters.

With no one playing the diplomat, there is little left to say.

The city keeps its elves locked in one tiny quarter, apparently dying of a blight-plague which Leta hasn’t seen in all their travels across Ferelden. She would see it unmade, if she could.

She leaves Denerim dressed in matching drake scale armor with a rose in her pack and the knowledge that not everyone sees her as either an elven servant or an ill-prepared avatar of death sent to drag the world to rights. 

***

“The Warden? One of those wild women of the Dalish, face all tattoos, Maric’s bastard following her like a man bewitched. Can you imagine? Not just an elf but such a savage one.”

***

Before long they are attacked by darkspawn. This has become mostly unremarkable, but this particular group was the first to brave their camp. It is disagreeable to wake to Morrigan’s yells and darkspawn growls and the mabari’s barking.

The last of the intruders turns out to be Tamlen, whom Leta had almost put out of her mind in the weeks since she’d seen him last. He is much changed, hair gone, half-mad. He seems smaller, whether because she’s spent too long among humans or because of the poison he’s succumbed to. Despite all the changes, he knows her.

She kills him anyway.

Alistair asks who he was and holds her afterwards, saying that for someone so wracked with darkspawn taint death is a kindness. Perhaps it is - Leta certainly would choose death over becoming a broodmother, and Tamlen had made his choice clear. He stays with her as she stands over the body and wonders how the taint makes its changes, how much she has changed since the ruins, since the joining. If she had reached for the mirror instead would Tamlen have stood over her? How he would have hated the politics, the way people stared.

The grave she digs is too shallow but the best they can do without a proper shovel. The seeds Tamlen would have preferred can’t be found nearby. Her allies are kind but they never knew him and for all her stories and songs Leliana never learned the dirges Leta knows in her bones.

They camp there a second night and Alistair sleeps in Leta’s tent. His breathing, his warmth, they help. Perhaps they are both marked for death. They’re not dead yet.

***

While bullying slow-witted templars is no particular hardship it seems an unnecessary effort just to reach the island of Circle Tower. They arrive to find the Knight-Commander in hysterics over blood mages and demons, already prepared to kill everyone beyond the antechamber to keep whatever was inside from getting out.

Mind control is terrifying, of course, but Leta kills with poisoned blades and explosions. You use whatever advantage you can get. It turns out that those inside the tower include children and gentle mages and the tranquil. They are a formidable group, Leta and her friends, but only four of them venture into the tower itself. The demons are unpleasant and the viscera on the higher levels, like those of the dead trenches, a sign something has gone deeply wrong. Still, if a company of templars could not even attempt what their little group achieved they would have made useless allies. Better a handful of rebellious mages any day.

The Fade is another story, an obstacle she can forgive the templars for not facing. The dream-trap Leta finds herself in is clumsy, hastily chosen. There’s a certain appeal to a glorious victory at Ostagar but celebrating with three human wardens she barely knows? It’s not a difficult temptation to resist.

Regrettably the fiery mazes are much better constructed. They are full of enemies Leta would prefer not to have to deal with alone. Worse, their mouseholes and portals send her everywhere but where she wants to go.

Morrigan’s dream-trap is no more effective than Let’as own. Wynne is more complicated - everyone she loves dead, all too believable after their ascent through the tower. The demon’s greatest success is Alistair’s dream-trap, the only one whose dreamer would truly seek to stay. A loving family, an end to fighting. Perhaps, Leta thinks, Alistair really is happier there. Perhaps she should leave him to his illusions.

She’s not that selfless. Leta drags him back to reality.

With the demon dead it’s still not finished. At least for once it’s not a political dispute she’s been called on to settle; a problem with demons and their summoners is better suited to her team’s expertise.

By the time they are done there is only one mage left alive in the Harrowing chamber who hadn’t entered with Leta. The enchanter assures her that even the few mages who remain will be formidable allies against the blight. With any luck he’d be proven right.

***

There is an elf servant in Arl Eamon’s Denerim home terrified to be seen talking to Leta. Queen Anora’s closest companion is an elf maid from Orlais. They are refined, quiet women and when she sees them Leta wants to scream and run away with them but they wouldn’t appreciate either of those impulses.

They must kill fifty men before they break Anora from her cell. The prison is an inconvenience but one Leta and Alistair handle without much difficulty. It’s almost nostalgic, just the two of them talking their way out. 

Anora knows her own mind and is already queen. Leta’s choice is clear. With Anora’s letter she gains entry to the alienage and all the city elves who are not elegant and valued servants.

Leta wants to help Shianni lead a revolution. Instead she kills the Tevinter slavers in the ward and finds the rest in their shady apartment buildings and abandoned warehouses. Even Dust Town didn’t manage to support as many abandoned buildings and criminal empires as Denerim.

The leaders of the slavers offer them, oh, all manner of things. Political influence. Power bought with the lives of captive elves.

“It’s a reasonable opening offer,” Morrigan tells them. “What else can you give us?”

“Morrigan.”

“You can’t keep turning down every opportunity that comes along!”

And certainly the Tevinger mages could be valuable allies in the right circumstances. But they have kidnapped elves and would use them as spell ingredients. Morrigan might consider that a reasonable route to power but Leta saw herself in the caged elves listening to their discussion rather than the slavers, and she rather suspects the slavers think the same.

Leta kills the blood mage and looses the elves and doesn’t say a word to Morrigan as they conclude their business in the alienage. It’s not that she doesn’t think elves are people so much as that she doesn’t care about people in general, doesn’t understand that other people tend to at least pay lip service to the value of sentient life. It’s a blind spot that may get Morrigan killed one day. For all they’ve seen together, Leta isn’t sure she’d mourn her. She doubts Morrigan would mourn her.

She’s reliable though, she’ll stick with Leta until is dealt with, until she’s no longer looking for allies against her mother. So Leta takes Morrigan to the Landsmeet along with Leliana and, well, that’s where everything falls apart.

***

Despite all the political squabbles she’d already been pulled into, Lena didn’t really have a plan for the Landsmeet. She’d expose Loghain, she’d support Anora, and then she’d join the armies raised against the archdemon. The details could be left to all the political operators who would be there, most of whom had grudges of their own against Loghain.

It doesn’t work quite that way. She walks in and accuses Loghain of just a fraction of the things he’s done. The nobles laugh when she criticizes his actions at Ostagar as though she knows nothing of strategy, as though they look at her and see, at best, a weapon. Soon they stop laughing. They may not care about the elves of Denerim but for the hero Loghain to cooperate with Tevinter magisters, to sell them slaves from Ferelden, that they cannot accept.

Loghain - human, wealthy, Anora’s father, beloved by Ferelden - calls Leta naive. She poisons her blades in the duel and he fall at her feet and she…she doesn’t finish him then, which she lives to regret.

He has yielded, though, and the Orlesian warden suggests he can be useful. With the taint in his veins he’ll be someone else. He can die a warden, taking up the duties of those he’d killed and marked as king-killers. It makes sense. It’s an effective use of resources they can’t afford to ignore, not with a human army lost at Ostagar because of Loghain. Alistair hates very idea. Leliana and Morrigan are silent for once as Leta and Alistair yell in front of every human noble left in the country. Leta has managed to settle so many disputes since she left home but when she is one of the participants it’s different. She doesn’t know how to back down, she can’t seem to de-escalate and so before a fascinated audience the longest-serving Ferelden warden declares is lover is not just inhuman but monstrous, a woman he had never truly known. He will not fight at Loghain’s side; he will not fight this blight at all, nor stay in Ferelden as others do.

Before she can properly respond Anora is calling for an execution to tidy up lines of succession and Leta has to argue with her - she can’t understand Alistair’s decision, but he shouldn’t die for it. He lives. He leaves. Leta is general of the armies raised against the archdemon - her tactics mysteriously no longer in question - and she spends the night after this promotion with the mabari in her lap, waiting to see if Loghain will survive the joining. 

 

When they return to Denerim with armies at their back the city is half-destroyed and burning. They fight their way through, Leta implacable and determined as the rest of the fighters. Shianni holds the alienage. She’d be a good Keeper, if the city elves organized themselves that way. On the roof of the fort Loghain strikes the final blow against the archdemon.

“How will you tell this story?” Leta asks Leliana as they help put out fires and drag corpses to the lye pits dug east of Denerim.

“There are so many possibilities! It will be a nice political fable, Loghain redeemed in his sacrifice, a new royal line established with Alistair gone.”

“Hmmn.”

***

“The Hero of Ferelden? A fine general, I suppose, but a constant nuisance after the war, always pressuring Queen Anora about the status of the Dalish and plotting with that red-haired woman down in the alienage. The country’s run more smoothly since she left court for good.”

***

“Finally caused enough trouble that her own people sent her off, maybe. I heard she headed north.”


End file.
